L'INTERVIEWEUR: Si vous pouviez commencer par dire votre nom et l'épeler pour nous, s'il vous plaît.
VERNA MILLER: My traditional name is Bebehla (ph.) which means “frog” in our language. One of the many orthographies used for that is P-e-y slurpy “L”-a. (Laughter) That’s the best way I can say it.
Mon nom anglais est Verna Lorraine Miller. Mon nom de jeune fille était Walkem; Walkem.
Q. D'où venez-vous?
A. I’m from Cook’s Ferry Band in Spences Bridge, BC.
Q. Cook’s Ferry?
A. Cook’s Ferry. Two words. Or as the old people used to say: Cook’s Shbelle (ph.) (Laughter) Spences Bridge is a really tiny little town in the Interior of BC. It’s about an hour and a half south of Kamloops on Highway #1.
Q. Bien. Et quelle école avez-vous fréquentée?
A. I went to St. George’s Indian Residential School, about 3 miles out of Lytton.
Q. Était-ce un anglican?
R. Oui.
Q. Quelles années y êtes-vous?
A. De 1954 à 1966.
Q. Quel âge aviez-vous lorsque vous avez commencé?
A. I actually went there when I was 7. I had already done Grade 1 via horseback in Spences Bridge, but it was too much for my grandparents. They were my major caregivers. And of course pressure from the Indian Agent had me shipped off to St. George’s, where I failed one Grade actually.
Q. Vous souvenez-vous de votre premier jour?
R. Oui, assez étonnamment. J'ai eu la chance d'avoir 2 cousins plus âgés qui étaient déjà là et ils m'ont en quelque sorte aidé tout au long du processus. Mais je me souviens avoir mis la robe, les petites pinafores qu'ils nous ont données quand nous sommes arrivés. J'étais un peu inquiet parce que ça ressemblait à du papier. Ce qu'ils avaient fait, c'est amidonner le bejesus de ces robes, il fallait donc les décoller pour les mettre. Mais ils étaient faits pour les petites filles.
Q. You had said that the Indian Agent —
L'agent des Indiens est-il venu vous chercher chez vous ou comment cela s'est-il passé?
A. No. I think because of previous experiences, all of my father’s siblings had gone, except for the youngest brother so the process was already there. And because my grandfather at the time was chief I guess there was pressure there, too, to make sure we were sent away to school.
Education was actually really important to my grandfather but I don’t think they understood the impact of what the Residential School was doing to us until probably in my lifetime anyway I got to understand more about the relationship that I did not have with my father and why that was the way it was.
Q. Vous y êtes resté quelques années?
R. Oui.
Q. Pouvez-vous décrire une journée typique et peut-être simplement passer par quand vous étiez très jeune et comment c'était, et si vous vous souvenez de la première nuit et d'avoir si peur d'aller au lit, etc. Et peut-être comment cela s'est passé au fil des ans.
Q. Pour moi, c'était plutôt par cœur. Nous nous sommes levés à une certaine heure chaque matin. Nous nous sommes habillés. Nous nous sommes brossés les cheveux et avons fait nos dents. Nous sommes descendus et avons pris le petit déjeuner et sommes montés. Nous allions prier chaque matin sanglant. Nous avons joué pendant un petit moment, puis nous sommes allés à l'école.
La chose la plus traumatisante pour moi était probablement l'énurésie nocturne. J'étais un lit plus humide jusqu'à l'âge de treize ans environ. Beaucoup de ces trucs étaient vraiment désagréables, comme les insultes, me mettant dans une position pour que les gens puissent se moquer de moi.
Je me levais le matin et il y avait une flaque d'eau sur mon matelas, alors je devais retourner mon matelas. J'ai dû descendre et apporter mes draps à la buanderie, les laver à la main et les suspendre à la corde à linge. Bien sûr, tout le monde le savait, alors j'ai été ébloui par les autres enfants. C'était l'une des choses qu'ils nous ont faites. Ils nous ont appris à être méchants les uns envers les autres, à être insultants. Ils ne comprenaient absolument pas pourquoi je mouillais mon lit.
I’ve since found out it’s hereditary because my younger son did it as well, but I sure as hell didn’t do to him what they did to me. I was having none of that.
That was probably the most horrible memory of growing up in a dormitory. I pee’d my bed.
The other nasty part of it was —
I mean, look at me. I’ve got freckles. So I got a lot of insults from both sides. The half breed. You’re not a real Indian. And the converse of that, “you’re a dirty little Indian”, sort of getting it from both sides. But it just makes you tougher and meaner. (Laughter) But as a little girl you’re trying to figure out what is going on here, all these contradictions that are sort of jamming themselves into your head. It can screw a person up.
But I think what saved me was my grandparents because they were very loving and very supportive, whereas my aunts and uncles didn’t quite have that. In retrospect, they had already been traumatized by the Residential School experience. And of course back then we didn’t understand what we know now.
Q. Comment décririez-vous votre expérience résidentielle dans son ensemble?
A. I don’t know if I could do it in one adjective.
Q. Et bien sûr élaboré.
A. In retrospect having gone through that experience and then having had some worldly experience since then and the learning that I’ve gone through, the different life experiences that I’ve had since, the thing that I am most —
I don’t know if anger is the right word because it goes beyond anger.
The fact that both my grandparents had so much knowledge and I spoke the language before I went to the Residential School —
Actually, when I went to Grade 1 I didn’t speak English.
I am still really angry about the loss of my culture, the loss of my language and the loss of our social structures more than anything. The loss of our knowledge. Well, I wouldn’t say the loss but the diminution of our knowledge base because my grandmother, both my grandparents, were somehow connected to what we call Shoohonamem (ph.), which I guess an English term would be medicine person. But it went beyond that because they both had tremendous knowledge in the use of plants for medicinal, spiritual, artistic, technological —
Vous le nommez. Ils avaient une encyclopédie des connaissances que je pourrais même trouver un mot par rapport au vocabulaire qu'ils avaient en ce qui concerne les questions relatives à nos connaissances autochtones.
Q. Vous apprendraient-ils ces choses lorsque vous viviez avec eux avant d'aller à l'école?
R. Avant d'aller à l'école, oui. J'apprenais petit à petit. Mais une fois que j'y suis arrivé, c'était tout. Puis ma grand-mère a commencé à tomber très malade, alors quand j'étais à la maison, je la soignais et j'essayais de l'aider avec des choses.
It’s interesting because there’s sort of this gap that I have in my head after I went to Residential School. She still played a major role in my life but there’s lots of gaps in there. The summers that I spent and the Christmas holidays that I spent at home, there’s just little pieces of memory that I have of her.
Q. Vous rappelez-vous ce que vous avez ressenti de rentrer à la maison la première fois, le premier été après votre première année à l'école?
A. I was really confused. I was really confused because I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t spend all my time with my grandparents. But on the other hand I could understand in my tiny little mind. My grandmother was starting to get sick quite often so she couldn’t look after me and the rest of my relatives either didn’t have the patience or were in circumstances where they couldn’t look after me.
My mother died when I was a baby so I don’t remember her at all and that’s the reason I was raised by my grandparents. My father was hopeless, plus he was starting another family of his own. We’ve always had a really superficial relationship. He’s either really kind to me or out and out nasty. In retrospect I’m starting to understand why. It took me a long time to forgive him. Even after he died there was still a lot of carry-over of the bitterness that I held towards him. It wasn’t until, oh, let’s see. He died in ’97.
I started work at our Healing Society in 2004, and right outside of Lytton is a place they call the airport. And as you come up the hill and you go across there’s a steep hill. It’s a gravel pit now but there’s a steep hill. That was the point-to-point place and my father was always a really excellent rider and he always won that race. It’s a really dangerous race because you’re coming almost at a ninety degree angle. It’s certainly more than forty-five degrees coming down this hill. Because he was such a good horseman he was winning these races quite often. That’s the first time it clicked for me after all this time, my God, I forgave him.
There are still some underlying issues but I’m starting to understand more and more about why my father was the way he was. He was confused, too.
Getting back to what we discussed before. Oh, I’m having a menopause moment here. (Laughter) I have to go back and try to think what it was I was going to say.
One of the other issues that I had —
Oh, I’ve lost it. It might come back to me later on.
Q. Vous parliez de votre père.
A. Yeah, there was something. I was talking about him. A thought came to my mind and I couldn’t remember what it was, but it was something critical about what we missed.
Oh, c'était une question de religion.
My grandparents were very spiritual people. I think they were trying to get a grasp of these Judeo-Christian principles that weren’t quite jiving with our spiritual life. I think that’s another battle I have today. I made a conscious decision that I was no longer a Christian, that there were other alternatives but I would not insult Christianity the way Christianity insulted our spiritual lives by calling us heathens. So I jokingly tell people I’m a born again heathen whether they like it or not. They can take whatever interpretation they want from that.
Mais j'ai toujours de gros problèmes avec les institutions religieuses, qu'elles soient catholiques, protestantes ou autre. J'ai de vrais problèmes avec le facteur de contrôle et la culpabilité. Il m'a fallu beaucoup de temps pour comprendre pourquoi je me promenais avec beaucoup de culpabilité.
Q. Vous souvenez-vous de moments précis où vous étiez à l'école, parce que vous n'étiez venu que dans votre propre langue, de la façon dont ils vous traitaient lorsque vous parliez votre langue ou essayiez de pratiquer une culture ou quelque chose du genre?
A. We couldn’t even do that. Not so much me, but I remember it happening to other kids. I had my 2 older cousins and by then I had learned some English so I was able to get by. But some of the things that they would say to the other kids, just insulting and not —
Sometimes they didn’t know, too, that what we know today there are sometimes people who can’t learn the same way as other people. I count myself as a very tactile learner. I have to see it and I have to do it in order to understand it. I’m not an abstract learner. I have to see and do and be right there in the moment.
I remember we had this young girl come in. She was quite a bit younger than me. She couldn’t speak. She just didn’t speak. She didn’t have the ability to speak. It took them a long time to realize that she didn’t speak. She had a physiological problem where she couldn’t speak. So they finally sent her away to a school where they had speech pathology. We never saw her again. But things like that.
Toute la question du contrôle est ce qui m'a vraiment touché. J'avais beaucoup de mal au pensionnat parce que je conteste. J'ai répondu. Je suis attaché. J'ai été giflé. J'ai été fustigé. Vous l'appelez, je l'ai. Je jurerais. Je dirais de la merde, et la prochaine chose que vous savez, ce serait d'avoir le critère sur mon cul pour avoir dit de la merde.
Q. Y a-t-il des souvenirs spécifiques de cette époque qui me viennent clairement à l'esprit?
A. Yes. I remember I was down at the bottom of the field and I forget what I was doing. We were playing or something and I got really upset about something and I said, “Oh shit.” Immediately one of the girls ran up to the supervisor and told on me. They hauled me into the office and took down my underpants and whacked me with a strap. I remember that. Another time I swore. I can’t remember the exact circumstances but I did swear and I got the yardstick across the back of my hands.
Il y a eu 2 autres fois où je me souviens précisément que d'autres enfants avaient été battus. L'un était en 3e année. Un de mes camarades de classe avait fait quelque chose pour déplaire à Mlle Beatty (sp?).
Permettez-moi de parler du Dr Shapiro lorsque j'en aurai terminé. Rappelez-moi parce que ma mémoire est horrible.
I won’t give the name but this boy had done something to really displease Miss Beatty. She brought him to the front of the class and there was a long bench facing the blackboard. She made him take down his pants in front of everybody in the class and she smacked him with a yardstick. And of course he wouldn’t cry because our men are told not to cry. You don’t show your emotions. That’s why they’re so fucked up now.
Anyway, that’s one thing that just freaked me right out.
But the worst thing I ever saw happen was there was a girl of about fifteen or sixteen. At that time the Hives (sp?) were there, Canon and missus, and his daughter Jean Purvis (sp?) and her husband Ron Purvis. I’m giving names. I don’t give a shit any more. (Laughter) So sue me. They’re all dead I think.
This wonderfully beautiful young woman was working in the Kitchen. We all had our chance to work in the Kitchen so we stole food or we got pissed on vanilla, whatever the case may be. I didn’t get to that point but I used to steal food. Well, this one day this girl, this friend of mine a little older than me, had to bring up a pan of cookies. The pan was about this big (indicating) and about that high. She had to take these freshly baked cookies that we never had access to up the stairs and go over to the Residences. The Residences were where the principal and his wife and his family lived. I’ll just call her Annie but that’s not her real name.
She took those cookies over and of course on the way she filched a couple. She got there, handed over the cookies, came back and I guess the mother and daughter were talking later and found out that a couple of cookies went missing. Well, we were all lined up before lunch on this particular Saturday or Sunday, I can’t remember. It was probably Saturday. They made this big speech in front of everybody of how Annie had stolen these cookies and that they were going to punish her.
So they took Annie out of line and of course Annie is walking like this (indicating) with her head hanging down. They took her over to the boys’ side and told the boys what she had done. This is a beautiful young lady who had never done anything wrong in her life, wrong in the context of she wouldn’t hurt anybody deliberately.
Remember, she’s fifteen or sixteen years old. They took down her pants, lifted up her dress, took down her pants and strapped her in front of all the boys and she had her period! That just blew it for me. That’s when I went on a tear. That’s when I actually started to understand what these people were doing to us. That’s when my cheekiness and my rebelliousness really started to build up tempo.
Before that I was just being a kid. The logic and the reasoning wasn’t quite there at the time, but when they did this to Annie that tore it for me.
Q. Quel âge aviez-vous alors?
R. Je devais avoir environ onze ou douze ans, juste à la puberté, alors c'était le genre de chose qui se passait à l'époque.
Then it started to click for me. What in the hell are these people doing to us? Why do they do things like that? That was what it was all about, getting us scrapping with each other. And they still do it today whether they realize it or not. I’m pretty sure they do. I’m talking in general, the non-Native people, pitting us against each other. They did it in Residential School so it carries on into our politics and our daily lives. It’s still happening.
And then to try and understand and show a little humanity towards each other, it’s not happening, not in the big picture. There are small pockets of people who are really working hard on their healing to try and dismember the past from that context.
Q. Vous alliez parler du Dr Shapiro.
A. Dr. Shapiro. I was in Grade 4, my first year in Grade 4. He was the worst nightmare I ever had. Because I’m fair and my grandmother, my mother’s mother was from Oklahoma originally, she used to write me these letters. She used to call me princess Vernie. Well of course when your mail came in they opened it. So I would get these letters and somehow it got back to Dr. Shapiro that this is what was coming in my letters. I was being referred to as “My little princess Vernie”. That’s what my grandmother called me.
I don’t know what it was, but he just had it in for me from the first day I stepped into Grade 4 until I left. I failed. I failed because of him. He would insult me. He would berate me.
Q. Vous souvenez-vous de quelque chose de précis?
A. I remember doing a spelling test. I’m pretty good at spelling. It’s probably one of my stronger points. For some reason I couldn’t get anything right that day. He just addled my brain. I remember him saying to me, “Well, little princess Vernie, you failed again”, just picking at me like that. It was sort of ongoing. I couldn’t do anything right in any subject I did and he put me right in the front of the class.
I think he was there for the last half of my Grade 4. There was another teacher for the first half of my Grade 4 and then I think he was there for the last half. I can’t remember the exact details. But it got so bad that one day I left the class with a migraine. This is a young girl with a migraine headache. I went to the Infirmary and they could hear me howling all over the school because I was in such bloody pain. When I got to the Infirmary the Matron at the time, I think it was Miss Chabling (sp?) was her name, she said, “What is all this racket about?” And I couldn’t even talk I was in such frigging pain that I couldn’t even talk.
They gave me some medication. I went to my dorm. They put me in bed and that’s when I don’t remember anything after that. All I remember is that I failed horribly. Of course when I got home I got berated for failing. But the next year made up for it because I had Mrs. West and she was just a treasure. She really helped me rebuild my confidence in myself. She was probably the exception to the rule because she treated every single one of us with respect, unlike anybody else.
J'avais Mlle Hodgins (sp?) En 2e année. C'était une autre très bonne enseignante. Mais en particulier, Mme West s'est démarquée davantage parce que j'avais traversé une année si traumatisante au cours de ma première année de 4e année. Elle m'a donc vraiment aidé à recommencer à me reconstruire.
Q. I rarely hear about a good teacher, so here’s a new question. Did she ever do anything to make you feel good about your culture or anything like that? Or was it just in the teaching? She made you feel good inside.
A. It was just in the way that she taught us. She was fresh out of England. But I think what blew me away more than anything is that she respected us as individuals. I never heard her make a negative comment about us culturally. I don’t remember anyway. But maybe it was because the year before was so dam traumatic for me.
En fait, c'était si mauvais que le Dr Shapiro ait demandé à mes camarades de classe de m'appeler métis. Certains d'entre eux étaient des métis, ou l'un de leurs parents était métis. C'était horrible. Ce fut l'expérience la plus horrible que j'aie jamais eue.
I can talk about it now without emotion because I hope I’m past that. But forgiveness? In the shit house as far as I’m concerned. It’s just not there for me. I can never forgive that kind of lack of professionalism for one thing. How dare an adult treat a child like that? You just don’t do things like that. I don’t know where the hell he was coming from because what I knew of him is that his wife and family lost their lives in the concentration camps during the Second World War, so it wasn’t computing with me. Why is this man so horrible to me, in particular me? It was strange how it was just me. Whether I reminded him of a lost child or something, I never knew. I could never understand that pure nastiness out of an individual who had been through hell himself, or purportedly had been through hell. And then to treat a child like that it just wasn’t computing with me. I couldn’t understand it.
Q. Donc, si vous pouviez le voir aujourd'hui, que lui diriez-vous?
A. Espèce de misérable fils de pute! (Rire)
No. I would ask him why. Why were you so awful to me? He’s probably dead now. But why was it me? I don’t mean to sound selfish. Why was it just about me? But as a little kid you’re trying to figure these things out. What is going on? Why is it just me? Today it wouldn’t happen. I would have him in an arm lock. (Laughter) And then a bunch of noogies on top! (Laughter)
Je ne sais pas pourquoi il ferait ça.
L'autre chose qui me dérangeait, c'était en 5e année maintenant. J'ai eu M. Fidel (sp?) Qui, je pense, est toujours en vie. Nous lisions une histoire dans notre livre de littérature anglaise et cette histoire particulière parlait du peuple Shuswap qui était vraiment féroce et ils ont tué et ils étaient horribles et toute cette méchanceté. Je viens de mettre ce regard sur mon visage et j'étais vraiment bouleversé et mon langage corporel était juste là-bas.
Mr. Fidel started to tease me about it. What’s the matter, Verna, you don’t like what you’re reading? I said, “No.” And he said, “Well why?” “This is a true story.” I said, “I don’t see it.” I just don’t like this.
So he started to make fun of me and then of course the rest of the class started to make fun of me because I took offence to the way this story was written. I don’t remember the exact words but I just knew that I was really really insulted and that’s not what I wanted to see or hear in a book of literature.
Q. Pensez-vous que parce que vous étiez fort, vous avez reçu plus de ridicule pour en quelque sorte vous abattre?
A. Yes. I was cheeky. I was a brat. At least that’s what they told me. In retrospect —
There are still some of my schoolmates who give me a hard time about it. But I thought, no, that’s not what it’s about. In retrospect when I look back I had a tremendous sense of justice. And when I saw that was out of alignment I wasn’t afraid to challenge, dam the consequences, because I was in trouble a lot.
When I got into my high school years of course you know teenage angst and playing the drama queen and the whole thing, but it went beyond that sometimes. I even got to the point where I attempted suicide at one point because it was just beyond my ability to sort out what was going on because I didn’t understand what was happening to me. You’re coming into puberty, you’re trying to understand what is going on with your body and nobody is there to tell you or nobody is there to empathize with you or help you understand because they didn’t know either.
Sex education was this film we watched and we thought, oh yeah, okay, this happens to a woman’s body. This happens to a man’s body. Whoopy ding. But nobody said this is how you get pregnant.
I guess because we’re more sophisticated today too when it comes to those issues, but there was nobody there to help you figure out what was going on with you.
Q. So even getting your period and stuff, because that would happen to a lot of girls. And you weren’t going home at night so they wouldn’t tell you anything about that?
A. It was always hush-hush. I remember coming down the stairs and of course being bold as brass I yelled at the Matron, “Hey Mrs. Smith I need some supplies”, meaning I wanted some more Kotex pads. She said, “Shh, don’t be yelling that stuff up and down the stairs.” And I said, “Doesn’t everybody have it?”, in my innocent thirteen years old, “doesn’t everybody get it?” (Laughter)
It was very hush-hush. I think the first time it happened to me I had a little bit of coaching. I kind of knew what to expect because my aunt sort of started to give me a heads up on what was coming, but it was very clinical and it was like being —
Oh, she was just really straight forward and cut and dried. There was nothing fancy about it. So when it did happen I went to see the Matron and she sort of coached me a little bit on how to look after myself. But I didn’t realize we weren’t supposed to yell across the room that you were out of supplies. (Laughter)
Q. Vous avez dit que vous vous sentiez suicidaire. Était-ce à peu près à cette époque? Quel age avais tu?
R. Non, c'était un peu plus tard que cela. J'avais environ quinze ans.
Q. Pouvez-vous en parler? Était-ce en quelque sorte votre plus bas, lorsque vous avez senti que vous aviez touché le fond? Est-ce à ce moment-là que c'est arrivé?
A. I don’t know if that was one particular incident where I felt —
I felt many lows because I was so dam rebellious. I forget. You know what, I can’t even remember the circumstances behind it. But all I kept thinking about was why would I even want to live. Nobody cares about me, you know me. My grandmother had already passed away. She passed away when I was thirteen, going on fourteen I think. So that was pretty traumatic for me because she was my main line of support.
I think I was having a row with our supervisor and she wouldn’t let me do something and I was really upset about it because I really wanted to do it. I don’t know whether it was going to town or what it was, but for some reason she wouldn’t let me. And I got into a big row with her and then the Matron got involved. They both yelled at me and I’m bold as brass so I’m yelling back.
Finally I just stomped off and I went into the locker room, and at the other end were these windows and there was a whole bunch of books there. I was so angry and so upset I went over there and I just reamed off all the books because I’m physically strong. I went over there and I just grabbed the books and I flung them across the room. I stood up on the windowsill and I said, “What are you going to do about it?” I was right —
— End of Part 1
A. Anyway, I was standing on the windowsill and they were yelling at me, “Verna Walkem, you get down off that windowsill right now.” And I said, “Make me.” “If you come near me I’m going to smash this window and jump.” And of course we were on the third or fourth floor, I think, third floor. My friends were there and they were getting really worried because they saw that I had reached my limit and they sort of knew what it was. I was known for having a really hot temper. They saw that. They just said, “Leave her alone, we’ll look after her.” So they went off in a huff and the girls finally got me quieted down and pulled me off the window.
After that I just fell apart. It was too much for me and I didn’t understand what was going on, so I just fell apart. It took a long time for the girls to console me and get me back into a place where I didn’t want to commit suicide.
But it was rampant. It wasn’t just me. It was rampant. I had a friend of mine OD on medication right in the Residential School. She was my best friend.
Q. At-elle trouvé le médicament à l'infirmerie?
A. She was in the Infirmary and she got into the medicine cupboard and she OD’d. I had to go with her to the hospital. The principal drove us down and I had to go with her. It scared the shit out of me and this was after I had made my attempt. She had made 2 attempts.
The boys —
About 2 or 3 other girls, younger and older than me. But it was rampant. The scary part of it is in the community of Lytton when I was going to school, Lytton had the highest rate of suicide per capita of anywhere in Canada. It’s still going on. We had 4 suicides in 3 months last fall, 4 of them that died. There were 2 other attempts. One was a guy and one was a woman. Thankfully they were able to pull out of that.
But it’s frightening when despair brings you to that point where why bother. What the hell is there to live for? I’m more frightened now of our men and our young boys being in that position because I think the school did more damage to our men.
Women, we’re out there. We’re scrapping and we’re doing the best we can to see if we can bring some peace, especially at the grassroots level. We know that’s where stuff happens. Screw the politics. The politics are so dysfunctional. But I know that at the grassroots level we’re getting stuff done.
Our women are starting to understand why education is so important at a higher level because we’re advocates. We’re the ones who are actually the leaders in our community from a traditional perspective, but our men are still behind. Everything is in here (indicating) and when they do blow it’s suicide, violence, murder, sexual rape, sexual assault, anything like that. That’s scary. That’s where that crap is happening right now. It’s our men and I’m really scared for our men because we need our warriors back. We need our men back. We need them back in the place of honour that they were before the Residential School system.
It wasn’t the patriarchal paradigm where the man is dominant over the woman. It was a partnership. Women knew what their responsibilities were to make the family unit work. Men knew what their responsibilities were and they worked together as partners. And it’s not there any more. That scares the hell out of me.
Q. Et votre guérison? Comment ça s'est passé depuis le pensionnat? Qu'est-il arrivé juste après et qu'est-ce qui vous a amené ici aujourd'hui?
A. I married my high school sweetheart right out of high school and we moved away. He was in the Navy at the time and we moved away. I went on with my life. I had my family. I tried my best to be a good mother. In retrospect there were probably some things that I didn’t know about motherhood because I wasn’t mothered. I was supervised. I was herded around like a little duckling and then a sheep.
I have an amazing mother-in-law who helped me quite a bit with understanding how to raise children. And I read books. I still wasn’t the best mom. There was a lot of stuff I didn’t understand about motherhood and my responsibility as a mother. For example, how to get my kids through school because nobody was there to help me get through school. I got through by the skin of my teeth and I barely graduated from high school.
Somehow my kids survived me. I think I’ve inadvertently passed on some of my issues to my older son, without even knowing it. My younger son seems to have inherited more from his father’s side than my side, which is a good thing because he’s pretty together. He knows his own mind and he knows what he wants to do in life.
As far as healing, a conscious effort for healing didn’t really happen until 1991. My kids had already left home. We had moved back to BC. We were living back east at that point. It was in 1991 I think, I had heard about the Indian Residential School Conference that was taking place in Vancouver and Sharlene Bouleau (sp?) was the one who had organized this in ’91. So I thought I would go. I was asked by my Band, “Would you go?” And I said, “Sure, I would love to go.” “I know what it’s all about.”
I went. It was very cathartic for me. I didn’t realize how much garbage I was packing around but I had managed to hide it. I managed to hide a lot of stuff. It was really cathartic for me because then I started to understand some of my reactions to different situations in life. That was really cathartic for me. I cried like a baby. I didn’t realize I was packing all this stuff around with me.
The only bad part of that is after the fact I’m thinking, “What do I do now?” And then gradually I started to seek a bit of counseling and do a lot of reading, a lot of introspection on knowledge that I had gained, discussions that I had with other people that I had gone through the system with. But I think the most incredible thing for me was in April 2004 I got hired on as the Project Facilitator for the Inklingkat (ph.) Health and Healing Society, and we are funded by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. When I got to get into the job more and more I was torn between “wow”, their success. People are finding their way. They are understanding. They are healing.
And I think that helped me heal too because I’ve always been a very empathetic person. I started to gain more empathy and understanding for my own healing journey within the issues I was dealing with. And I guess even before that I started to realize I had been calling myself a victim and then I said, “No, I’m not a victim.”
Okay “survivor” is all right and then I started to think, “Well, I’m past that, too.” I attended. I’ve gotten through most of that stuff. I’m not going to relive the past. I’m not going to let the past affect my emotional future. Because I’ve got too much to fight for right now and I’m not going to let that crap drag me down.
I’m pretty passionate. I’m really passionate about our People getting past that, getting past the victimization, getting past the “survivor”, being able to say, “listen I went.” “It did this to me.” “It screwed me up.” “It did all kinds of things to me.” But you know what, I’m not going to let them win. I’m not going to let them win by continuing to be a victim, by continuing to call myself a survivor. Because now I’m going to fight and I’m fighting mad. I’m never ever going to let —
I’m going to make sure with everything in my power that I can do that I will never ever let something like that happen again. It’s not in my future. It’s not in any of our futures to let something like that happen.
I’ve been associated with some really incredibly intelligent people that have helped me see past some of the stuff that went on and really look at we’re not going to get anywhere until we get over that stuff. And it gives me great hope because I see the people in our community who are healing, who are understanding that, yes, they don’t have to live in the past, that they can make their future.
I can take the knowledge that I remember from my grandparents and I can make a new future for myself. God knows we can’t go back. We would regress if we went back, so what we have to do is take what we have now and move it forward and keep moving forward and not let non-Native people get in our way.
I know we don’t have a lot of control at the government level. But that doesn’t mean we lie down and die. We get our dam dukes up and we duke it out with them until we get what we want. I’ve always said that this is my passion in life. I will do everything I can to make sure I get the best that I can for our People, based on what they want, not what I want. I know what I want.
But whatever our People want, those of us who can, need to put our dukes up and get out there and fight for it. Because the issues aren’t going to go away. And when I look at my own community I know there’s still a lot of work to be done. A lot of work to be done. But even the one or 2 or 3 successes we have are better than nothing. And that’s where I see hope. I mean there’s always hope and that’s where I see the hope.
I still have a lot of fears. I’m still really worried about the people that may not make it. The anger, in particular, we’ve got so much anger. To be able to gain enough knowledge to get past that anger.
The other part of it too is a lot of our People are afraid of change. It’s more comfortable to be staying in that place of anger and nastiness and lack of growth than it is to take that chance. Because we were never allowed to take a chance. We were never allowed to be responsible. We were never allowed to be out there, to have a mind, to speak our mind without getting into trouble. We were never allowed to question, just for the sake of questioning to learn more. It was very rote. It was poor education, very poor education.
And just not having the social skills to survive because when I first got married and moved away, I had no clue, absolutely no clue about how to run a household because I was raised in an institution. I was making porridge for 200 people every morning. I was doing 200 sheets of laundry once a week. I was cleaning long halls. When I got married I couldn’t make porridge for 2. It was like porridge for 400! (Laughter) It took a lot of adjustment for me to figure out how I could cook for 2 people. There were a lot of skills I didn’t have and it was by sheer dumb luck that I managed to get through somehow, get through life.
I had a very supportive mother-in-law. I had a very understanding husband because most of his friends were from our community. He never grew up with any sort of racist commentary. I never heard a racist comment come out of him, even to this day. Some of his friends were maybe a little, but most of his friends were First Nations anyway so it didn’t really matter because he’s not First Nations himself.
Mais quand je repense maintenant, je suppose que la plus grosse pilule d'amertume que je dois avaler est la perte de nos connaissances. Pas tant la perte, mais la perte de l'opportunité de faire passer ces connaissances de la génération précédente à ma génération et à la génération suivante.
I try not to carry a lot of bitterness around. I don’t think it’s healthy. But I have my moments when I still feel angry that there’s a lot of lost opportunity with my grandparents, the knowledge that they had that we could have carried on into today.
But the fight isn’t over. Maybe it will never be over, but I don’t care. I’m going to be out there duking it out to my dying day. (Laughter)
Q. Avez-vous quelque chose à dire avant de conclure?
A. Now I’m going to get emotional because I always do. My grandparents were amazing people. If it hadn’t have been for them I don’t think I would have survived. They didn’t really understand what was going on in the Residential School system. But in their own way they were supportive and they were amazing. It was a huge loss for me when my grandmother died because she was my major support system. She got me through anything, through puberty, the whole thing.
I really missed the fact that she wasn’t there to watch me grow up and to be there as my support mechanism because a lot of my angst and the problems I got into she would have been able to help me get through them and maybe I wouldn’t have been so angry. I don’t know. But they were amazing people and I really really miss them.
I remember my grandfather saying one time when he came to pick me up from the Residential School. This was after my grandmother had died. I must have been about fourteen or fifteen. We were sitting in this place in Lytton where there were a whole bunch of logs where people came to sit. This acquaintance of his came up to him and started talking. They were speaking our language. This fellow was saying, “I’m taking my kids out of that school when they’re sixteen because they don’t need to go to school after that.” And my grandfather said, “My girls are going to school til they graduate.”
Dans notre famille, les femmes ont été placées sur ces socles. Nous avons été mis sur des piédestaux et Dieu nous en préserve si jamais nous faisions quoi que ce soit par lequel ce piédestal serait expulsé de dessous nous. J'ai donc grandi dans une famille de femmes percutantes déterminées vraiment fortes. Il s'agissait de ne pas faire de prisonniers. C'est le genre d'attitude avec laquelle j'ai grandi et cela m'a causé des ennuis.
One time I was trying to help another student in Grade 11 or Grade 12 and I was trying to help a Grade 7 student with some work. Something happened and we started giggling. This teacher came over and she told me to stop it and I said, “Why, I’m trying to help?” Before I could even get the rest of the sentence out she hauled off and slapped me across the face. My automatic reaction was that I turned around and I whacked her across the gut. It was automatic. I didn’t even think.
Well, I got hauled on the carpet. At that point the principal was going to send me home. I said, “No, I’m not going.” “If you send me home I’ll get a licking when I get home.” Because by then my grandmother is gone. My grandfather was quiet. But my father would have beat the crap out of me. And of course everybody else in the family would have come down on me. So I told him if he put me on the bus I’m stopping the bus and I’m getting out in the middle of the highway and I don’t care where it is and you’ll never see me again.
Cela semble un peu contraire, mais j'avais peur de rentrer chez moi. J'avais peur d'être renvoyée chez moi parce que je savais que les coups à la maison seraient pires que la détention pendant le reste de l'année que j'aurais à l'école.
To a certain degree they were afraid of my physical size so they didn’t often push me, but they sure knew how to get to me up here (indicating). The mental abuse I think affected me more personally than the physical abuse, because I got it. I got the strappings. I got the smacking with the yardstick and the slaps across the head, the slaps across the face, everything. But I think maybe they knew they could only push me so far and that would be it. I don’t know. That’s just my perspective.
It just makes me so angry that the Compensation package does not acknowledge emotional and cultural abuse, any of those things. Because that’s where it is. How the hell can you not prove it? The evidence is so blatant, especially in our more remote communities.
I remember talking to an associate of mine who said she flew into a community that was absolutely stunningly beautiful until she got into the village. She said that there isn’t a child in that village over the age of fifteen who has not been sexually abused. She said, “The day I was leaving I was waiting for my float plane to come in and take me out and here was another float plane offloading the booze, and God knows what else.”
It’s that that scares me. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation apparently is not getting any more money. It just angers me so much to know that the government will continue to do this to us. They’ll throw us the dog scraps, watch us scrap over it and when it’s all gone they will just leave us hanging. That scares the hell out of me because I don’t know where I’m going to go after this. I’m fighting like a son of a bitch right now to try to find out what to do about it.
But there’s only me. I’m not good at advocacy. I’m good at debating, but I’m not very good at advocacy.
It’s times like that I feel a bit powerless. I don’t like the politics we’re in because it’s equally as dysfunctional. I don’t know. Like I say, on the one hand I have hope and on the other hand I’m scared spitless.
Q. Merci beaucoup. C'était une interview incroyable. C'était incroyable.
Un merci.
Q. You said you weren’t good at advocacy but we’ll just give you a copy of this and send it out. You’re incredible.
Un merci.
— End of Interview